The Pentagon has reduced the number of furlough days for civilian employees under sequestration, but much anxiety and uncertainty remains as workers wait to hear whether they’re exempt.

“It’s good news,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday at a press briefing announcing the reduction of furlough days from the planned 22 days to 14 days. “It’s good news from where we were.”

Furlough notices are now expected to go out in early May, but the Defense Department still hasn’t decided who will be spared. Senior defense officials said 14 days of furloughs for some of the department’s estimated 750,000 civilian workers would save about $2.5 billion this fiscal year but could not say how they came up with that dollar amount without knowing how many employees would be exempt. All uniformed personnel are already exempt.

“This is a really critical decision for the department, and senior leaders are engaged in a very methodical process to identify the category of employees [that] will be exempted,” a senior defense official said. “It’s a very difficult and complicated decision.”

The original plan to furlough workers for 22 days would have saved the department $4 billion to $5 billion.

The furloughs are now set to begin in mid-June, though senior defense officials were quick to point out that all of the plans “are subject to change.”

The continuing spending resolution signed into law Tuesday by President Barack Obama will give the Pentagon the flexibility to move about $11 billion into its operating and maintenance accounts, Hagel said. “It did fix some of our original problems; it put some of the money back in the right accounts,” he said. “But we still don’t have the flexibility we had hoped to get.”

Hagel said he was concerned that it’s expected to cost $7 billion more than planned to fund Overseas Contingency Operations, which pay for the war in Afghanistan. But he said the projected savings needed to implement cuts under sequestration, which kicked in March 1, is now at $41 billion, down from $46 billion.

He also said the Pentagon is “short at least $22 billion” for this fiscal year.

“We’re going to have to prioritize and make some cuts and do what we gotta do,” Hagel said during a joint briefing with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey.

Already halfway through the fiscal year, Dempsey said, the Pentagon has already spent 80 percent of its budget so it will be tough to find places to cut.

Whatever the Pentagon can do to mitigate the pain of deep cuts still won’t be enough to avoid them altogether, Hagel said.

“There will be some changes, some significant changes,” he said. “There’s no way around it.”

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 5:11 p.m. on March 28, 2013.